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Dear websites, stop asking for ransom sign-ups

iamvishnu.com

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Re: Dear websites, stop asking for ransom sign-ups

#201

Post by kerkeslager »

earthling8118 wrote: post #199
kerkeslager wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The programmers who implement this have to do what their boss tells them to, or change jobs, and this isn't something worth changing jobs over. I disagree. I've been very intentional about the places I work and have managed to build a successful career while never implementing a dark pattern. "I was just following orders" is not an excuse. Take responsibility for your actions.

I've walked out of jobs for being outright abusive before. This has made the job search much more difficult for me and has been a point of controversy in the hiring decision before. I held out for many months without employment but the savings dry up. This isn't a viable path for everyone to take. It has stunted my personal development and put me in a very difficult financial position.

Walking out might not be the best strategy.

Part of my success in this has been being more selective in the job search so that I'm not working at such a company to begin with.

I'll note that jobs which don't behave ethically with regards to dark patterns, also tend not to behave ethically with regards to their employees. If people care more about making money than doing what's right, that tends to be pretty pervasive in their behavior.

Re: Dear websites, stop asking for ransom sign-ups

#202

Post by kerkeslager »

kayodelycaon wrote: post #148
kerkeslager wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The programmers who implement this have to do what their boss tells them to, or change jobs, and this isn't something worth changing jobs over. I disagree. I've been very intentional about the places I work and have managed to build a successful career while never implementing a dark pattern. "I was just following orders" is not an excuse. Take responsibility for your actions.

Great. I have a disability and jobs I can do are difficult to find. The moral high ground is just a little bit harder to hold when your medical care isn't at stake.

What makes you think my medical care isn't at stake?

That said, I realize there's some privilege implicit in what I said.

Re: Dear websites, stop asking for ransom sign-ups

#203

Post by kerkeslager »

ihateolives wrote: post #174
kerkeslager wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The programmers who implement this have to do what their boss tells them to, or change jobs, and this isn't something worth changing jobs over. I disagree. I've been very intentional about the places I work and have managed to build a successful career while never implementing a dark pattern. "I was just following orders" is not an excuse. Take responsibility for your actions.

Great that it has worked for you. Life is not black and white though. It's easy to have a spine when you have fuck you money in the bank, but not so easy when you have family to feed. Would you starve you kids on principle just because you want to "take responsibility" at work?

I'd have no problem taking responsibility for my actions if my actions were "I implemented an unethical dark pattern for my employer because the alternative was letting my kids starve". "I was just following orders" isn't an excuse, but I'd venture "I was feeding my children" IS a pretty good excuse.

But that likely isn't the reality of the situation. If you're employed in software in the West it is very unlikely that your children are on the verge of starvation. Much more likely is that you might have to accept a slightly lower standard of living to work at companies that behave ethically, and I'm not particularly sympathetic to that.

Re: Dear websites, stop asking for ransom sign-ups

#204

Post by fishtoaster »

Nextgrid wrote: post #123
fishtoaster wrote: post #43

I hate those too. On the other hand, I've been adjacent to the decision to add them before. You're under a lot of pressure to increase conversion in your onboarding funnel, so you test out moving your email capture up a bit in your conversion flow (ie to before you deliver results) and it works! Conversion increases throughout the funnel! So you keep it. Dark patterns like this persist because they measurably work. S…

What does “conversion” actually mean in this context? Does it mean bullshit “growth & engagement” aka the numbers of (mostly non-consensual) subscribers in the spam list going up, or does it mean actual profit? I could definitely see it working for the first case, which is all that your typical product/marketing person needs to justify their salary thus why the practice is popular, but I wonder if this actually ends…

That's a pretty good question. Ideally you're measuring "paid us money" as conversion, and that was the case for the anecdote I had in mind in the above post: we had a checkout screen with a decent price tag at the end of the flow that we could measure against. We could track the impact of changes throughout that funnel on the bottom line.

But I have seen other decisions made based on proxies to "paid us money." Eg we find that X% people who perform action Y wind up paying us money, and for really long funnels it's easier to get statistical significance for action Y than for "paid us money." And so we make some change, find that it increases the rate at which people do action Y, and declare victory. We try to keep in mind potential downstream impacts (like loss of trust), but it's hard to argue a vague, potential downside against a solid, measured number sitting in a google doc in front of you. I suspect the phenomenon you call out is somewhat common.

Re: Dear websites, stop asking for ransom sign-ups

#206

Post by 93po »

dreamcompiler wrote: post #188

We desperately need a browser plugin that gardens search results to exclude websites that use dark patterns and allows a user to add a dark pattern website to the globally-shared list. Like ublock origin but for different categories of shady crap like content farms, AI-generated blogs, "product comparison" sites that slant results to the highest bidder, Cloudflare "checking your browser for security" sites, etc. SEO…

I only search Reddit these days and assume the rest of the internet is garbage, which it is 99% of the time

Re: Dear websites, stop asking for ransom sign-ups

#207

Post by DougN7 »

JohnFen wrote: post #194
jen729w wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> other than farming people for money Which is a beautiful way to live life. Until you quit your job and build some indie thing and try to make money and fuck, that’s difficult. And you’re broke. And you worked really hard on this thing. Turns out ‘farming people for money’ = ‘paying rent’. And you realise, shit man, if I make it a bit worse according to my ethics and taste, I’ll actually make money. And I won’t have…

What I hear you saying is that you're OK with harming others as long as it lines your pocket.

Harming? By asking for an email address?

Re: Dear websites, stop asking for ransom sign-ups

#208

Post by JohnFen »

DougN7 wrote: post #207
JohnFen wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I hear you saying is that you're OK with harming others as long as it lines your pocket.

Harming? By asking for an email address?

No, not by asking for an email address. By not asking for the email address until after the user has invested time and energy into things.

That's pure psychological manipulation, and is harmful.

Re: Dear websites, stop asking for ransom sign-ups

#209

Post by Sylamore »

dreamcompiler wrote: post #190
data-ottawa wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The good news is so many people are signing up for our email! The bad news is for some reason email reads and click through just dropped off a cliff, is like the emails no longer arrive or something.

Side issue but it still amuses me that companies think they can accurately measure email reads. I'm not talking about mass marketers where it doesn't matter but banks, which are required by law to switch you back to paper mail if they think your email address isn't working. The reason you think I'm not reading my emails is that my email client doesn't autoload images, and I keep it that way because it turns off a mal…

Yeah, it was creepy the first few times Chase bank begged for more ways to contact me "because you don't seem to read our emails" for marketing. So far they haven't threatened to move me back to paper bills I guess cause the email isn't bouncing.

I've noticed over the last couple of years in particular that more and more emails coming in are image based only, with no plain text or even alternate text so that if you won't load images you can't even tell what the email was about. Yeah those I never read.

Re: Dear websites, stop asking for ransom sign-ups

#210

Post by Sylamore »

data-ottawa wrote: post #136
Sylamore wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The faster a web site asks me for an email address determines how fast I bail on even looking at their product/tool, or if I have no choice I put in a bogus email address to get past it, if it is one of those damn forms that sends you a link I use one of the various public inbox/temporary email address sites so I don't have to deal with the attempts to bring me back into the conversion funnel when I was just seeking…

Would it be better if I hold off until you scroll? After all, you’re more engaged then!

Don't forget to pop-up a full overlay on the screen if I happen to move my mouse outside of the browser rendering window asking me for my email address, so that if I did tab away from the page now all I see is a full screen ad and not the content I was looking at before.
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